Journal

The journal on portikus.de operates as an extension of the exhibitions at Portikus themselves. A wide spectrum of contributions including essays, interviews, fictional writing or photo- and video-contributions provide a closer look on artistic interests and reflect on topics that concern our society, politics and culture.

On the occasion of Arin Rungjang's exhibition Bengawan Solo at Portikus, Paula Kommoss speaks with the artist about the genesis of the work and the meaning of the river Bengawan Solo.

PK: What really interests me, first of all, is how did you come to find the singer for your work Bengawan Solo?

AR: A while ago, I was in Yogyakarta [in Indonesia] and had started to do research on Diponegoro, the priest to the Sultan of Yogya who is depicted in a painting by Raden Saleh. Raden Saleh was an Indonesian painter who fled from the country because of political aggression between the Dutch administration and indigenous Indonesian monarchy during the mid-19thcentury. Saleh went on to study Western painting, and his style was inspired by Delacroix, for example, which you can see in his compositions, use of lighting and so on.

Of course, all of this has been studied, and here I was wandering around in all this history about Yogyakarta and Indonesia in general, and I was also looking at the Chinese communist movement in Indonesia and so on. So, I had done all this research, and then I kept thinking about my relationship to Indonesia in general, which is always my starting point to making work. But I couldn’t find a very real connection to this material, except with the song ‘Bengawan Solo’, which I began to see would be my point of departure.

The first time I heard ‘Bengawan Solo’, I thought it was a Chinese song because I didn’t realise it hadn’t been written by the Chinese woman who sang it in 1960s. In a sense I had taken the Indonesian away in my mind. The song was really important personally because it was connected to a time in which I was questioning my sexuality, I was gay, I was not that gay, I didn't know what I was. I fell in love with a guy because of this song – it was a very romantic period for me.

I had the song in my mind for a very, very long time – stored in some part of my brain and my memory and then, even before I came to Indonesia, I discovered that the song was not by the Chinese woman after all, but that it was an Indonesian guy who wrote it in the 1940s, when he was only 19 years old. He had quit school and was working in a Kroncong band, the traditional Indonesian band that you can see in the video. And so, he created ‘Bengawan Solo’, which became incredibly popular. When Indonesia came under Japanese occupation [during the second World War], two years later, the song spread throughout Japan. There was a Dutch woman who was born in Indonesia but grew up in a Japanese internment camp, and she knew the song because it was played by the Japanese. It became stuck in her memory too, and so she sung a version of it as a teenager in the 1960s, which became really popular in Singapore and in other parts of Asia. So that was the song, and all these stories that are part of it became part of my knowledge, too.

I then got to know Rochelle – who sings this version of ‘Bengawan Solo’ – through a mutual friend. At that time, I was looking for someone who could imbue the song with more meaning beyond my own personal memories, and to share the song and its resonance with that person. So, my friend introduced me to Rochelle, a singer in a Kroncong band. Before we met, I didn’t know that Rochelle was the daughter of Lendra, a very important poet, or that her mother was a Princess, one of the daughters of the Sultan of Yogya. I was just looking for a singer who could deliver this song and share in its meanings. We met and got to know each other, and I learnt about her personal memories and history and so on, and it was so great – that there was this connection that I didn’t expect to find. I mean, I guess because things are always in circulation, things are always just there, even if it’s happening through different times. And so, the work is also about these layers of histories and memories and what we couldn’t foresee.

Actually, I didn’t need to put all that information onto the table in the show, it was just a way to display my research. For me, it’s enough to look at Rochelle singing that song and think of all these things that were happening before, before the song became so evocative for me. Like the Chinese using the river as a way to transport dead bodies during the Communist regime, and also Mushagra, Diponegoro, Raden Saleh’s painting, and all of these narratives that were in circulation through history, through art, and through memories – that’s what I think is so rich and thought-provoking.

PK: And the great thing is that all of these stories are brought together through the song ‘Bengawan Solo’, which tells the story of the legendary Solo River in Java, the island’s longest, in a really poetic way. The river is both the song’s main narrative, flowing from mountains to the sea, but also its title. So, on the one hand the lyrics lay out this seemingly simple story, but on the other, there are all these layers of narratives that you have just described: that the song comes historical connotations of the Japanese occupation, and something you mentioned earlier, that during the Communist regime, the bodies of those murdered by the state were washed by the same river. These stories are often violent but the song is beautiful, and whether you speak the language, or you don’t, a song is always a way to reach out to people.

AR: Yes, and so much spirit…

PK: …and to trigger emotion in a way.

AR: Yes, and once the work was done and shown, it was not just about me and Rochelle anymore. Like my story might be a silly one to share with the song but Rochelle’s is really rich, and also, I like to think about those people who might say “I remember this song”, and can share their own memories as well. I like what you just said about even someone who had never heard the song before, being able to access it through the narrative. So, it means that it is not just the song that evokes emotion and opens people’s hearts and feelings...

PK: Yes, and also because the song plays in a loop throughout the work, you sit there and you start reading the story as it unfolds, but the music keeps repeating over and over. As a viewer, you add all these layers on top of the music; it’s a nice way to make the song richer for everybody. And actually, I heard the song for the first time in the film In The Mood of Love (2000) but of course I didn't know anything about it then.

AR: I have used two versions of the song in my work – the version from In the Mood for Loveand the version that speaks to my experience as a gay man, which is the original recording of ‘Bengawan Solo’. Actually, [in that film] they made it into a love song. I think the film is very poignant, every time I watch it, it always gives me tears because it’s such a symbol really, about the people who lived there peacefully, and then it becomes kind of actively related with other knowledge – a cruelty of the world and colonization and so on. The land has been there for thousands and thousands of years, and on it people live and die, live and die, live and die, and they leave traces of their memories in the land and for me it’s beautiful.

PK: Yes, I think so too, and you are opening up with this really personal story, which in a way makes you vulnerable. And this is a starting point that I appreciate a lot, explaining how you discovered that you’re gay and so on, and how you become conscious of this through the romance that this song embodies for you, which adds such an emotional layer to it.

AR: And that works because I made the work specifically for Indonesia, and because if you’re gay in a Muslim country, it is very difficult, and I had a very difficult life. To share the work as an Indonesian gay Muslim was to give those feelings space, and I wanted to show the audience that they could maybe share in this level of intimacy between myself as an artist and them as the audience, through the song.

PK: You’re making it possible to expand this song, which is from Indonesia and everybody there will have their own personal connotations of it. But through opening it up and to align it with love as well is expanding the context of the song once more.

AR: It’s not only about being gay as well, I mean love as it is for all human beings…

PK: And acceptance, in a way.

AR: Like when Rochelle talks about Gusta – “Gusta is the almighty”, and Gusta doesn’t have gender – Gusta could be anything.

PK: Especially when Rochelle talks about her father, and how when he got older his ego wasn’t in the way anymore. I found that really interesting, because one could argue that when people are strongly against something, or stuck in their ways, it’s mostly because their pride is in their way. Whereas in your work ‘Bengawan Solo’, there are two narratives woven into each other and also visually, you’re surrounded by a kind of orchestra – as a viewer you feel as if you are almost facing a community.

AR: Yeah, it’s not a movie – I mean, it works in the way that we are using this type of virtual immersion to convince people, so it’s like the narrative is going on inside someone’s head.

PK: Yes, and I’m happy we get to see it here in Frankfurt. Songs are good tools to get people’s attention.

AR: It’s really that simple, yes? Because I have been working with moving image for many years and it was always different from recreating an event as a film, because it’s about how to transform it – because I always think that nothing can replace reality, and once the moment has passed and you want to go back to it, it will already have layers that weren’t there before. But I have been thinking about how to make such a recreation into something more transparent, and so for me music is about representing reality in a different way. In one sense, music is just music, but as with this song – it was created in 1940s and already had all these historical resonances, and so all these years later it is not just about the original song itself but all the layers of the spheres that the song has passed through. I think that’s enough – Bengawan Solo has its own content and to allow this content to appear in the current contemporary moment, I think this is really important.

PK: What I also like, is when you first sit down in front of the work, in a way you just read the texts. Yes, you encounter these different musicians and the singer, but for me it was kind of like going on a story ride, you know? Because as you describe the river and what happened, it’s like this storytelling moment that transforms the viewer into a child that listens and soaks everything up and from there you go on throughout the work. And somehow the story isn’t closed, which is really nice.

AR: Yeah. That’s great. I’m planning to do a new work in Berlin next year and I hope to add some other pieces.

PK: That sounds really interesting.

AR: And you know, I wasn’t quite sure about my way of making work. I mean, as a person growing up in Thailand, in that region the majority of our knowledge is not that strong, so to speak, it’s not that constructed like in Western countries. I liked conceptual work when I was young, I found it really thoughtful, but I mean we weren’t really into nature. And also, in our culture we never separate body and soul, body and spirit. A person is never separate from God. It was almost like Joseph Beuys but it was not this constructed idea. It was just in the nature of the people who lived there. It’s both a bad thing and a good thing. The bad thing was people prayed to the tree for good luck and so many outside people said that this is so Barbarian or something, but still others have attached themselves to nature, and for them they will never separate themselves from the earth, from the trees, from the river. Deep down they believe that one day they will go back to the river, to the earth, to the trees again and I have never disregarded this. I think this is how we communicate with things and a vantage point I could appreciate. I mean, not just to treat reality as a source material to reproduce in art.

PK: That adds another dimension to the river in your work, because the river is symbolic of an eternity, but I think besides it being, you know, old-fashioned to prey to a tree, it still shows a kind of respect for nature and its power when you’re surrounded by it.

AR: There’s also one poem by an Indonesian poet, which is about a person that wants to walk across the river and he is hesitating because he sees his relative’s spirit fill up that water and he cannot step into the river because of his ancestor.

PK: There is so much additional information for your work.

AR: Because the process is so complex, all the information, research, and so on. My work that was at documenta 14 246247596248914102516 … And then there were none(2017) too – that one was super rich too, so much information – this, this, this – we have tons of information…

Skin covers the surface of the human body, shrinking or expanding as the body moves and bearing the marks of its actions and the impacts it has suffered. Objects that cling to the skin, that are used or worn by the body, influence its posture and the way it moves and conversely adapt (or are adapted) to its characteristic movements. Clothes, shoes, furniture, and prostheses add to the body’s repertoire of forms and functions. They endow it with abilities that, in and of itself, it possesses only to a degree; for example, they enable it to withstand cold without feeling it, to sit elevated above the floor, or to walk with a single leg. Even when they are not in use, these objects evince the traces of their application: they are virtual images of their wearer.

The pedestal is a body in space. When it appears in the context of an art exhibition and supports an object, that is a choice made by third parties (artists/curators). This choice stands for the duration of its presentation. It prompts contact between two bodies, the supporting body and the one being supported. The pedestal adds several functions to the object to be supported: it sets it apart from the space around it and elevates it; the floor on which the beholder stands is no longer the ground on which the object rests, this provokes a distance that brings the perception of its surface into focus. That distance elevates the object both in fact and in the idea. Things reduced to the purpose of being beheld become (virtually) untouchable and no longer belong to the realm of objects of utility.

How present may a pedestal be in the framework of a presentation? It depends on how self-contained the work of art it supports is, or in other words, how strongly it insists, by virtue of its facture, on the difference that sets it apart from the space around it. When object and pedestal make their presence felt with equal force, the pedestal becomes part of the work of art.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Vetrina-Specchio, 1966

However, there are art objects that do not rest on a pedestal and nonetheless engender the distance from the beholder required to be perceived as untouchable works of art. A higher degree of autonomy is attributed to works that produce this effect by dint of their own constitution rather than by virtue of their being installed on pedestals. When their surface is in direct contact with the floor they share with the beholder, they do not require any support.

John McCracken, Minnesota, 1989

The body of the pedestal can manifest itself in a variety of ways. The more “normal” it is—the more its form follows its function as a humble support—the more it will tend to become invisible. The further it deviates from this subjective standard, the more its presence will be felt. Factors that play into its visibility or invisibility include its proportions, form, materiality, and surface. When a pedestal does not support an object, its surface becomes a projection screen. The more it departs with regard to these traits from what we are used to perceiving as pedestals, the more it will become an autonomous sculpture. An object of utility then metamorphoses into an object of contemplation. The distinction is not clear-cut. Transitional phenomena range from a sort of phantom pain making the absence of an object on the pedestal so keenly felt that its likeness seems almost graspable, to the sense of formal saturation evoked by the appearance of the pedestal itself.

Shahryar Nashat, Chômage Technique (A,B,C,D,F,G,H), 2016

Shahryar Nashat’s work Chômage Technique consists of pedestals painted in a rose color and installed on chair-like stands, where they seem to be basking in the pink light filling the Portikus. They face Nashat’s video Present Sore, which shows bodies in action as well as rigid poses in brief but intense sequences. The camera pans over flawless or bruised skin surfaces, focusing on the points where they come into contact with apparel, bandages, and prostheses. Then the video gingerly approaches one of Paul Thek’s Meat Pieces, with cables and hoses protruding from it; it is repeatedly interrupted by a rendering of a pink-dappled menhir that lingers on the screen longer and longer. The small pedestals dispassionately observe the goings-on in the realm of things: relieved of their function, they shall not be made to support any of it.

Spotting the Shottspotter: photograph of Shotspotter microphone installed on the top of a street lamp. Courtesy of the artist.

In December 2014, new audio evidence emerged that captured the moment when unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri that August. The audio was submitted by an anonymous man who incidentally caught the moment of the shooting as he was recording and sending a private voice message from his phone using the Glide app. He only realised much later the significance of the gunshots he had accidentally recorded.

In this recording it is audible that Brown's murderer, a police officer by the name of Darren Wilson, fired his gun ten times. Six of these shots hit Brown, mostly in the head (all above the torso). And yet there is another and unexpected violence that is captured in this recording – one that, whether presented on CNN or to the grand jury, listeners were asked to ignore. While both defence and prosecution provided forensic audio experts to provide their own accounts about the gun shots that could be heard in the background of this recording, neither realised that the greater Police violence enacted upon the residents of Ferguson and many other African-American neighbourhoods in the United States, was in the foreground, clear for all to hear.

This is the recording transcribed with both the foreground and background sounds included:

Dr. Robert Showen was one of the key expert listeners in this case. His analysis of the gunshots centred mostly on the echo they created. Using the impulse sounds of the shots and their reflection off nearby walls, he was able to define the space around the shooter. As each echo of each shot was very similar in sound, it meant that a conclusion could be drawn that the murderer was stationary and stayed more or less in one place while he was firing the shots. This evidence corroborated some eyewitness testimony and was also key to denying the veracity of other contradicting accounts. Technicalities that amounted in the end to a greater body of evidence that concluded that unarmed Michael Brown was charging at the officer and that the officer was therefore acting in self-defence when he repeatedly shot Brown in the head.

The expertise of Dr. Robert Showen was called upon because of his extensive experience of working with gun shot sounds as echo location instruments. Showen is the founder and creator of ShotSpotter™, a gunshot detection and location service, which works by installing microphones throughout a neighbourhood to listen for sounds from the street that might be gunfire. When the microphones detect a loud bang, they automatically triangulate where this sound is coming from. The information is algorithmically analysed against a huge database of loud bang sounds to quickly verify if the sound registered is indeed a gunshot. If it decides that the sound is gunfire, it sends the location of the gunfire to the Police Department. This is on average accurate within thirty feet of where the shot happened. ShotSpotter™ system of microphones is now installed in eighty "troubled" neighbourhoods across the United States. They have aspirations to cross the Atlantic, having now installed systems in South Africa and, after the recent attacks in Paris (November 2015), they saw the opportunity to make themselves available on the European market.

Dr. Robert Showen told me in an interview that ShotSpotter™ microphones are typically placed on the rooftops of buildings so that one can "listen to the horizon". "So they are mostly installed on private property?", I asked. His response was: "Yes we went out with the police officers and knocked on doors and asked if the people would allow us to put a sensor on their building to help protect the community from gunfire, practically everyone agreed [...] everyone was just willing to donate their roof for the benefit of the community". Showen's statement that "everyone was willing" seemed contradictory with ShotSpotter™, whose whole rhetoric was constructed on its necessity as a security infrastructure, based on the fact that the communities affected by gun crime were made up of unreliable witnesses who failed to report more than eighty percent of the gun shots they had heard. The idea then is that ShotSpotter™ would replace these unfaithful ears with law abiding microphones and be able to algorithmically detect eighty percent of gunshots that went previously unreported. Showen says: "Our sensors' microphone sensitivity is almost identical to what is on a cellphone and a speakerphone". But the human hearing capacity is in general much more sensitive and adapted to reading sounds than a cell phone microphone placed on a rooftop. Therefore the issue is not that people don't hear the gun shots and the microphones do, but rather that people hear the gunshots and choose not to report them to the police. This startlingly high figure of unreported incidents suggests that, as in the case of Michael Brown and hundreds more since, the police can be more dangerous, more racist and more trigger-happy than the alternative. Showen seems oblivious to this idea when he speaks of the brutal inauguration ceremony that happens in each community when ShotSpotter™ is installed: "When we install a system, we have the police go out and shoot and we see the accuracy and the sensitivity of our system".

It is no surprise then that when Showen forensically listens to the recording of the death of Michael Brown, he doesn't hear the loudest aspect of this recording: the love-struck voice who, despite the sound of gunfire ringing out loud outside his window, continues unfazed to send a message to the subject of his admiration. Oblivious or perhaps not caring that the message of love he is sending is underscored by the sounds of brutal violence. "You are pretty" he says, and then a short pause that is long enough for a volley of six shots to ring out, and then a brief break in the gunfire and he resumes by saying "You're so fine". Is this short pause an acknowledgement of the gunfire? Is he waiting for it to subside so he can carry on with his message? Perhaps akin to the pause we might make in our conversations while a jet flies overhead? Or is this pause a coincidence and he has simply become totally desensitised to the sound of gunfire outside his window? Either way, this voice that ignores these very loud sounds rather than alerting the emergency services is treated as irrelevant in the courtroom. Yet, this voice which jury members were asked to ignore is ironically the most relevant way to understand the extent of violence in these communities and the endemic distrust of the police.

Many are concerned that ShotSpotter could constitute a fourth amendment violation – warrantless search and seizure of public sounds. A pervasive method of surveillance that could be used to record private conversations amassing a huge sound archive available for all kinds of security applications. Yet according to ShotSpotter's privacy policy: "The entire system is intentionally designed not to permit 'live listening' of any sort. Human voices do not trigger ShotSpotter sensors". And perhaps this is the more frightening possibility, they are not at all interested in human voices. That, rather than a new hyper-surveilled society that hears everything we say, ShotSpotter points to a society with a total lack of listening. That the more surveillance increases its sonic archives and audio databases, the less people are actually being heard. And when we listen to and not past the voice on the recording of the murder of Michael Brown what becomes distinctly audible is the extent of this societal deafness – a deafness of communities to gun violence, a deafness of the police to so-called "troubled" communities and a deafness of the judges and lawmakers to the social conditions that produce unreliable and uninterested witnesses.

The analysis of the gunshots that killed Michael Brown didn't work in his favour because the conditions of listening are determined by the same authorities that committed the injustice against him. Yet, what would a Shotspotter with its microphones aimed towards the police rather than the people enable us to do? The technology exists, it was already installed before we knew it and, though it has been recording every gunshot across eighty neighbourhoods, there has not been a single case where it was used as evidence to prosecute a police officer. What would it sound like if we could hear this vast database of police gunfire rather than have it ring out only in the desensitised and terrorised communities in which it is a regular occurrence. Instead of demanding our privacy be granted and rejecting this technology, we should instead be demanding more listening, more archiving in order to reverse-engineer it's selective ears. Building an alternative database of sounds from which this system can become artificially intelligent to another reality of violence.

Eight square aluminium bars of different lengths lean – at regular intervals – on the white wall of Portikus. The smooth polished surface reflects the light and the surroundings, wrapping it in a silvery white shimmer. On each of the long sides of the bars, a verse of poem number 1695 by Emily Dickinson, “There is a Solitude of Space,” can be read in black, vinyl, sans serif capital letters:

THERE IS A SOLITUDE OF SPACE
A SOLITUDE OF SEA
A SOLITUDE OF DEATH, BUT THESE
SOCIETY SHALL BE
COMPARED WITH THAT PROFOUNDER SITE
THAT POLAR PRIVACY
A SOUL ADMITTED TO ITSELF—
FINITE INFINITY. 1

The words of the nineteenth-century poet, who as a teenager had already retreated to the house of her parents in Amherst, Massachusetts, and while living as a recluse wrote 1775 poems. Her lines are forced into the vertical by artist Roni Horn and resound modestly in the exhibition space. In the 1990s, the artist developed a series of sculptural works entitled When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes that are directly related to Emily Dickinson’s poetic work, embodying and re-“enacting” her poems. The works question the exchange between language, object, and viewer and, in their calm, uniform appearance, promote the extension of established patterns of thought.

Roni Horn’s industrially manufactured aluminium bars interlink text and objects in many ways. They line up alongside one another like lines of poetry cut out of a book. Their metallic surfaces reflect Portikus’ upper wall and ceiling segments while assuming the white colour of a paper background. Where the letters touch the edges, they continue as markings. They thus surround the shaft of the bar and convey the image of inflated letters made of deeply absorbed ink. Here the two-dimensional medium of writing surrounds the three-dimensional body of the individual sculptures. Thus, the work of Roni Horn shimmers between two correlations of text-become-object: On the one hand, the lengths of the lines determine the exact size of each single sculpture while the multi-perspective characters emerge from their background; on the other hand, they are bound and tied to the carrier, thereby underscoring their formal correlation and dependence.

Each bar is also a self-contained and closed object. However, one of the middle bars arouses curiosity. It is positioned so that the side with the writing is turned towards the gap between the objects making the line “SOCIETY SHALL BE” indecipherable from the front. Since at this point the communicative function of writing dissolves in favour of its graphic qualities, a tense relationship between the objectness and the textuality results. The gaps become associative open spaces. They open our view to the white wall behind them, and, like reading between lines, allow us to search for further levels of interpretation.

As viewers, we are challenged in a special way by the characteristic of the text-object-relation. The reading direction and the course of the letters are always vertically oriented, so that the bars form links in a literary-poetic chain; a series of sentences whose syntax is disturbed by the different orientation of the text. We are urged to read with a constant change of perspective: at times from the bottom to the top, then turned around, and then mirrored. In this way, the work breaks with our usual, static reading behaviour. To grasp the sentences in their completeness, our bodies are forced to move. Disagreement arises between distance and proximity. On the one hand, we physically adapt to the direction of the writing while reading, but at the same time this specific interaction alienates our reading flow.

Roni Horn materializes the words of Emily Dickinson and translates them into a physical experience. She confronts us with a static corporeality that demands that we move. While quietly pacing alongside the objects, the sentences mentally shape themselves into a whole, creating the projection surface for a variety of readings and perspectives on the work. Standstill and movement, language and form flow together to a spatial and temporal experience within which the units dissolve. The artist thus creates a situation in which associative mental play and physical motion connect.

In many ways, the 1960s were revolutionary and groundbreaking for the visual arts. It is therefore not surprising that artists’ use of many previously unconventional materials in the work process originated or experienced a great upsurge during that decade in particular. Artistic boundaries disappeared or were re-explored and materials such as textiles soon became “autonomous artistic materials.”1

One of the best-known pioneers of this development was surely the German artist Joseph Beuys, who acquired an international reputation not least with a focus on the materials of felt and fat. Beuys’s American colleague Robert Morris is also known for his work with felt, although the two artists’ underlying intentions in their work with the material differed greatly.

The fact that textiles played a rather marginal role in art for quite some time before this can also be explained from a technological point of view. Ultimately, a certain type of machine was needed to weave large-scale ornaments and complicated textile designs. Although Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) demonstrated his famous loom for the first time in 1801, for a long time this technique was by no means freely accessible or it was horrendously expensive, making it difficult for artists to produce certain fabrics at all.

Jacquard looms are mainly characterized by the fact that they were the first of their kind that wove on the basis of punch cards, thus making complicated patterns possible. Each warp could thus be worked individually or in a small group per weft, which was impossible with previous mechanical models. “Acquired Nationalities” by Rosella Biscotti in the exhibition House of Commons at Portikus showed that this methodology is still relevant in the artistic production process.

Conceived as part of the 10 x 10 series, Biscotti works with demographic data from the Belgian census of 2001 and the national registry (January 1, 2006), transforms and models them with the help of programmed Excel calculation models to then visualize them on textiles with a computer-controlled jacquard loom. As for content, the artist is particularly interested in the tension between the individual in society and a statistical structure that is indispensable for the allegedly objective description of the same within political institutions. The result is an exciting interaction consisting of demographic data, its processing and visualization in 25 different shades of gray on textile.

In addition to the work of Rosella Biscotti, other recent Frankfurt exhibitions also showed works with a focus on textiles. One example is Willem de Rooij’s large woven pictures from the weavings series (2011-2014) in the exhibition Willem de Rooij. Entitled at the Museum of Modern Art – MMK 2. Since 2009, de Rooij has been producing the works in the Henni Jaensch-Zeymer hand weaving plant near Berlin. The dimensions of the works are always based directly on the capabilities and techniques of the looms. The artist compares the crossing of threads running in two different directions with terms such as opposition, contrast, transition and nuance. Some of the resulting textiles are highly reminiscent of monochrome paintings, but on closer examination the seemingly monochrome fabric reveals at least two color nuances.

Similarly, the artist Thomas Bayrle, who lives and works in Frankfurt, deals with textiles, or, more precisely, with ornamental pictures and the principle of the serial. With an eye for subjects from pop culture, Bayrle, who is a trained weaver, is particularly interested in “the relationship between the individual thread and the whole fabric”2
and compares this structure with the relationship of the individual with the collective or with society. In addition, the artist has also revealed his skills in applied art, as his designs for the world-famous fashion label Clemens en August show, which were also shown in the 2008 retrospective of his work at the Francesca Pia gallery.

As we see, textile works are neither superficial, as an association with the fashion world might perhaps suggest, nor do they represent a mundane craft. Rather, the mere complexity of the different materials proves that textile is an ideal medium to describe both individual stories and social contexts, or to even interweave the two themes.

From time immemorial, one of humankind’s most important missions has been to preserve knowledge. We do so not only by passing on oral traditions to subsequent generations, but above all with memory institutions. This collective term unites all those institutions whose goal is to preserve and convey knowledge. While libraries and archives may come to mind first, they also include museums. They are places that administer bits of contemporary evidence and seek to protect what constitutes the identity of a society: its cultural heritage.

All of these institutions do their part to ensure that we do not forget. Indeed, they function as a collective memory. But like personal, individual memories, there are events that we like to think back on in pride as well as unpleasant events that we tend to forget. Psychoanalysis refers to this process as repression. While the ordinary act of forgetting unconsciously stores irrelevant information in favor of the more important, with repression content is deliberately excluded from memory in order to avoid unpleasant emotions. Repression is thus a natural self-defense mechanism. But what happens when memory institutions also make use of this strategy? When those institutions in particular repress inconvenient truths that nevertheless are regarded as the guarantor of truth per se?

Michel Foucault robbed the archive of its innocence in the late 1960s. He pointed out that this place does not collect truths, but constructs them. Under the guise of objectivity, facts are first produced in such a way that each archived document implies a multitude of others that have not been included in the selection.1
If institutions such as archives and museums serve to administer both history and the present, we must be made aware that power structures within these institutions are ultimately responsible for which contents are rated as valuable and which are pushed into the cultural subconscious. Hence, cultural memory is no more than a canon.

Sirah Foighel Brutman & Eitan Efrat, Printed Matter (Still), 2011.

Those who are inscribed in this canon will not be forgotten. They are remembered. Just as Hanne Foighel remembers her partner André Brutmann. In the video Printed Matter (2011) by Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat, contact prints are placed on a light box while a friendly female voice comments on the negatives. The images belong to the artist’s father, the voice is that of her mother. Until his death in 2002, André Brutmann was a sought-after press photographer who followed the Israel-Palestine conflict in particular for decades with his camera. Yet the contact prints show not only pictures of abandoned cities and rebellions, but also pictures of his family. Brutmann’s archive is not just that of a photographer, but also of a father. The same rolls of film contain images of heads of state, funerals and children’s birthday parties. While the artist’s mother gets nostalgic when looking at the family photos – commenting on pictures of herself in a bathing suit by laughing, “this doesn’t belong here at all” – her voice often drops when she sees the photographs that Brutmann shot for the public.

Uneasiness accompanies these photographs. The memory of these moments produces silence. The manner in which Foighel talks about the pictures seems not only to provide information about the past, but also about the present. The memories of the political conflicts in the 1990s seem to dissolve mostly in silence because today there is still no solution for them in sight. Rather, the photographs seem to be a historical narrative of our present in that they remind the viewer of conflicts whose traces are still visible today.

“The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory (...), [but] the path of certainty: the photograph’s essence is to ratify what it represents.” 2
In photography, Roland Barthes sees only the image of a present that has already occurred, which can say nothing about a before or an after. In the same way, Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat seem to argue with Printed Matter not only by showing visual material, but having a contemporary witness comment and reflect it on the auditory level. They thus inscribe the archive of André Brutmann into the present rather than leaving it to remain in the past.

Sirah Foighel Brutman & Eitan Efrat, Printed Matter (Excerpt), 2011.

But unlike photography, memory is imprecise. It remains a fragment that can never be pieced together as one overall picture.3
Memory can muddle up data; it can confuse places and people. It can only remember significant events and even those can once again be forgotten. Moreover, it can repress. For this reason, it is especially the interplay of testimony and witness that can generate meaning at all. This connection precedes what we call truth and even then, it must always be verified.

3Cf. Siegfried Cracauer, “Memory Images,” 1927, MEMORY, Documents of Contemporary Art, London 2012: “Memory images appear to be fragments – but only because photography does not encompass the meaning to which they refer and in relation to which they cease to be fragments.”↑

On the occasion of Amy Sillman’s exhibition the ALL-OVER at Portikus Bernard Vienat talks in the following interview about the artists early years and her artistic practice.

BERNARD VIENAT: You started your career around the 1970s, at the same time that John Baldessari burned all his paintings. So it was certainly a time of hostility towards the medium. What was your survival strategy?

AMY SILLMAN: I didn’t have a “career” in the 1970’s, I got out of school in 1979. And the idea of a professional “career” was not what how were thinking back then. But for survival I had a day job: in the 80’s I worked at a couple of magazines, doing what was called “paste ups” back then, we fixed the pictures and type in place with wax. I wasn’t a punk with a Mohawk, but I was certainly spirited in a punk way. I think that underneath a lot of what I was doing was a “fuck you” attitude. Like, “I’m not supposed to paint anymore? Fuck you!” “I’m supposed to try to be famous? Fuck you!” So I would say I had a strong sense of negation. That was the ethos of the time, and I persisted in painting, as a pleasurable reversal to what we were supposed to do.

VIENAT: How did you first come to the idea of wanting to be an artist? And moreover to paint?

SILLMAN: I came to New York, not to do art, but to study Japanese at NYU. I had been on a wild trip to Japan, and was interested in studying a foreign language, one that was utterly undecipherable to most people I knew. I was interested in the idea that I could write in a code. So I studied Japanese, but I took a drawing class on the side, from an “action painter” teacher who literally played jazz in the classroom and taught us to look at a nude but draw it with turpentine-soaked rags. In this drawing class, I suddenly thought: “Oh my god, this is another kind of code language!” It wasn’t what I was thinking originally because I didn’t have any role models to be able to imagine that artist was something I could do. So in a weird way, I backed into it via the brush.

VIENAT: What other kind of teaching were you exposed to afterwards?

SILLMAN: Well, after the action painter, it was all these 1970s types: feminists, conceptual artists, filmmakers and post-studio people. I would say 95% of my friends had abandoned making paintings because of the bad politics that painting seemed to embody, the neo-expressionist critique was in full swing. All my friends were in class with either Joseph Kosuth or Hans Haacke. So it was really not cool to be painting, but I guess I was always interested in doing it in spite of itself.

VIENAT: You started your career after really important theorists had spoken about painting and the way to perceive it. How do you react for instance to Greenberg’s theories? Speaking about a punk attitude, didn’t you think: My father said so, so I’ll go against it?

SILLMAN: But Greenberg wasn’t my father! If anything he was more like a grandfather. No one I knew read Greenberg then, and I didn’t really understand the politics of art history. I was curious about his article on kitsch and the avant-garde. But we did not read much theory of painting back in the 70s. Painting was already dead on arrival. I described it once to a friend as like squatting an abandoned building. I got all my ideas from elsewhere: dance, performance, experimental film, and writing. I was not able to work within the logic of painting, neither from OCTOBER nor Greenberg

SILLMAN: I got an iPhone, and I finally had a camera to work with. Meanwhile, I was invited to do a collaboration with a poet named Charles Bernstein in NYC. I know a lot of poets and I’m interested in expanded language. We worked by sending emails back and forth, me sending drawings from iPhone, him sending me new edits of a poem to illustrate, each one effecting the other’s outcome. After that, I was invited to do a project at Castillo Corrales in Paris, and I suggested doing another animation with a poet friend of theirs, Lisa Robertson.

VIENAT: Are you still researching in this direction or was it just a phase of your life?

SILLMAN: I’m still doing it. I love painting as an act-- but finally I have realized that in some ways I think like a conceptual artist, but one who works physically and a bit irrationally. I am deploying language and space as much I am painting in the rectangle. So in some ways, just getting an iPhone really opened up my whole work process - I mean, that was very liberating.

VIENAT: The New York psychoanalyst David Lichtenstein, writing about your works and the idea of “origin,” speaks about the psychoanalytical moment when the object emerges. Referring to Lacan: When you are painting, are you in this state of anxiety? What is your painting mood?

SILLMAN: It’s half enthusiasm and excitement and a kind of openness to what might emerge, and the other half dread. It’s literally both. I read recently that having a full, precise spectrum of moods is sometimes referred to as “granular” in psychoanalysis. I love that word. This spectrum of mood is visible, for example, in the spectrum of my palette. I use a mixture of “readymade” color, coming right from the tube, very bright and sharp and clear, like cadmium red or citron yellow, unmixed, in combination with these sludgy, muddy colors that are scraped off from all those under-layers of paintings that didn’t work. Those colors are literally draining in a bucket for months at a time. It gets dirty and shitty and sludgy… and I realized that it’s the color of shadow, dirt, dust, and death. I love palettes that are a combination of dirty, anxious colors, not at all nice, used with these fresh, gaudy, concentrated store-bought colors. I think a psychoanalyst would say my painting moods are granular!

VIENAT: If we look at your painting as an entire psychoanalytical process, is it an empirical process in which you construct archetypal elements?

SILLMAN: That sounds very nice, but has nothing to do with what I’m doing. Psychoanalyzes are not so clean. Painting could perhaps be called empirical in the sense of being experience-driven? But certainly not leading to archetypes. The psychological landscape that I’m working on is absurd and packed with conflict and irresolvable eruptions of something that you can’t name. It does not end in cognition or meaning, necessarily. And is not about universal truth.

VIENAT: There is a lot of interior space in your paintings. Is it more an environmental observation of your own studio or more an introspective process?

SILLMAN: The studio is this horrible room that we stay in all day long, a lot of the time alone, for those of us who have a studio practice, but we also all look carefully out at the world, and what I see is translated into memory. So I think that the space of an image is indeed a kind of space, rather than a “depiction.” Images go from out to in, AND in to out, maybe my idea of interiority is balanced between these. The studio has been critiqued as a form of bourgeois interiority, but of course there is no more interiority in the studio than there is while listening to the radio. The world comes in and out of all of us.

VIENAT: But what does it mean for you to understand abstraction?

SILLMAN: I speak that language. I go to the museum and am not confused by shape, color, line, transparency, scale, opacity, layer, mark, gesture, and edge. I know how to get in that car and ride around.

VIENAT: What then would be your criteria to judge an abstract painting?

SILLMAN: Abstraction is the “shape of content,” a form for releasing meaning, or building meaning. Form should not be decorative or imitative. So to me, abstraction is a way to make up a hybrid language, to speak in code, or in a strange voice. So my criteria would partly be: does this abstraction add to the strangeness, the surprise, the feeling of curiosity, enthusiasm, freedom, a break in the oppressive regime of what is already set? Does it feel like there is a person talking, a personal-ness, and a kind of invention in it? Looseness, rigor, freedom, necessity to get away from whatever is already plotted out? If so I would say it was a good use of abstraction.

VIENAT: A trend with contemporary artists like a few on view at the current Berlin biennale seem to mirror our present time rather than develop any kind of subtlety. What role does poetry play in your work?

SILLMAN: Poetry is really important to me, but I like poetry that acts weird rather than useful. It’s a communication system that doesn’t deliver the goods exactly-- instead it sort of illuminates some outer edge, playing around even with the actual vocabulary, or timing, to make it more precise, wittier, more perverse, more intense than usual. That’s similar to what you would hope for if you are thinking of trying to make a “better” painting.

SILLMAN: For Portikus, I basically made an art show that is kind of made out of these looping mechanisms: first, when you come in, there’s an animation that loops every one minute, with these little cartoon figures doing sort of absurd things, a straightforward narrative. Then you enter a gigantic room of printed and painted panels, which loop all the way around the room like a frieze. But it’s clearly made from an abstract painting language, not like the narrative in the animation. But the idea is about the viewer and the “machine” of movement—the animation moves itself but in the painting room, you move through it, and past them. Then the final little event is the zine and this little ceramic figure I made as a kind of coin box: you throw a coin into the mouth of the figure and the coin comes out its ass, through a hole in the table, and you take the zine, and this image “loops back to the animation in the front. It’s a complex machinery that I’m attempting. The panels themselves are inkjet-printed canvasses with some painting on top. They are based on drawings I did, which make it hard to say what is machine-made and what is handmade. I also scaled back on the color of my usual paintings in order to emphasize repetition. And the prints are of my usual drawings but increased in scale to the canvas size. I wanted to absolutely fill the room, but suppress some of the other usual painting options.

SILLMAN: The animation is there to provide a kind of joke on the classical painting situation of a “figure/ground.” In painting terms, figure/ground is term for making a distinction between the whatever is the “subject” versus the background. “Figure” can even be used for the abstract stroke, it doesn’t have to be an actual figure, but here I wanted to literalize the idea of figure as a kind of joke. It struck me that all the paintings are abstract ground, basically like a wallpaper, so I thought I would add a real figure. But who? I had no story until my class took an ill-fated field trip to Switzerland, which ended in a series of small but comical disasters, and I realized, bang, there was my story. I made a kind of Rube Goldberg machine, a wheel of misfortune, which you have to sort of get on to understand!

Bernard Vienat currently studies curatorial studies, a master’s programme at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule and Goethe University Frankfurt. He studied art history and philosophy at the University of Bern and at Freie Universität Berlin. He is founder of the art association art-werk in Geneva and manages the exchange project with Mexico DF Vorticidad.

Artist Shahryar Nashat recently made Present Sore (2016), a composite portrait of the 21st-century body mediated by substances both organic and fabricated. In this new interview, Walker Bentson Moving Image Scholar Isla Leaver-Yap and Portikus curator Fabian Schöneich ask Nashat what drives his work—the politics of the body, its digital and physical augmentations, and its obsolescence.

Present Sore is presented on the Walker Channel from April 8 through May 31, 2016, as part of the Walker’s Moving Image Commissions. It is also featured in the Portikus exhibition ModelMalady (April 23–June 19, 2016).

FABIAN SCHÖNEICH: Your most recent video, Present Sore, streams online via the Walker Channel and is installed in your gallery exhibition at Portikus. The format of this work is vertical: 9:16 instead of 16:9. It reminds me of the way people shoot video on their phone. Can you tell us what led to your decision of rotating your camera?

SHAHRYAR NASHAT: It’s true—smartphones have generalized the use of vertical framing. When I came to Portikus for an initial site visit and saw the gallery, I immediately saw how a 16:9 format video would be crushed by the height of the space. On top of that, I had always struggled with the horizontal format of 16:9 because you can never fill the frame when you want to capture a limb vertically. PresentSore is an oblique high-definition figure study of a composite body. The video’s upward progression (from feet to head) necessitated a vertical format.

SCHÖNEICH: Your work often questions and highlights the homogeneity between object and body. Abstract but clean objects are representational of the body, or else the body is representational for the object or the sculpture. In PresentSore, we see the human body not as a whole, only in detail—like a close-up of the knee or the hand.

ISLA LEAVER-YAP: Totally. PresentSore’s focus on detail fragments the subject, showing the mechanical moving “parts” of the body and isolating their function as tools. This fragmentation implicates a wider cultural landscape that has preferences for certain types of bodies, pointing as well to an economic landscape that obfuscates the parts of labor—both human and inhuman. Shahryar, I was wondering if you could speak to this “composite” quality you referred to earlier, and talk about the bodies, types, and genders you choose as your subjects?

NASHAT: Mainstream cultural representation of the human body privileges a homogeneous and wholesome body. I have always searched to represent bodies that sit outside those traditional ideals. The bodies I’m interested in might have diverse motor functions, cosmetic interventions, and applications. Like the injured elbow in Hustle in Hand (2014, video, 19 minutes). That’s why I like wounds or prosthetics. They signal injury and, therefore, anomaly. Limbs are similarly interesting. Framed away from the rest of the body, they question it, while also allowing some psychological distance from the notion of persona. For me, this is where you open the door for desire and projection.

LEAVER-YAP: What do you mean by “desire” and “projection”? Both terms seem particularly resonant with how your work intersects with ideas of queerness. Your work blurs lines between fetish and tool and often trades in promiscuous formal relations, by which I mean things that resemble or “stand in” for that which they represent but also complicate that representation: a vertical format as a body, a Paul Thek artwork of a rotting piece of flesh for a psychic human wound, or an artificial prosthesis as a 21st-century ideal tool for the body.

NASHAT: I think art has always operated with the mechanics of desire and projection. Not only as an incentive for an artist to make work but the way the work is appreciated and consumed by the audience. The “stand-in” is a powerful strategy because it works through deception, which is another powerful ingredient. It all sounds very theoretical, but what I guess I am trying to say is that the frustration of meaning is central to any work because it creates desire. The tools I use in my work—framing, editing, a geometric object next to the close-up of a wound—participate in that enterprise.

SCHÖNEICH: Does imperfection define desire for you?

NASHAT: “Perfect” versus “imperfect” sounds like “good” versus “bad.” I don’t think it’s about morals. When I watch a movie or TV show, for example, the interesting characters are not necessarily the ones that have personality flaws or act inconsistently. I don’t care whether they’re good or bad people. But I do like it when there is a perversion in them, some kind of inconsistency. Incoherency creates a compelling and complex character. That’s desire.

SCHÖNEICH: How important is gesture in this work? I’m thinking especially of the sections of Present Sore where a lip is pulled or an ear is touched or plugged.

NASHAT: Capturing a body that is inanimate or frozen in action made sense in the 1990s when photography was concerned with creating tableaux vivants. But for me, the body in action is more interesting because it’s not just “on display” for the camera to get the best shot. It competes with the camera and forces it to find different strategies. It’s less mannered than a pose perhaps, and the formal and aesthetic gesture is not coming from what you look at but the way you look at it. When you invest the body with actions and gestures, you write a narrative for the body. You give it agency. I must say, though, that there are very active ways for the body to be passive—like a smoker or a sleeper, which are equally powerful images.

Shahryar Nashat, Present Sore, 2016, video.

SCHÖNEICH: How did you film PresentSore? Tell us about the overlayering of images throughout the video.

NASHAT: The layering was an accident that I ended up keeping. I have been relying on software bugs and my own technical mistakes a lot lately.

LEAVER-YAP: Your work is so carefully choreographed and edited that it’s really interesting to hear about the importance of accident within your practice. Accident seems to me to be such a human quality, while being attentive to accident is something very digital—a quality of being watched or surveilled. I was struck by something Moyra Davey said to me about shooting video last year. Moyra shoots mostly analogue photographs, and now she shoots digital video. She told me she liked how “video hangs onto accident” in a way that is particular to the form. The digital captures physical vulnerabilities as much as it can augment or erase those very qualities in post-production. I was wondering if you could speak to the notion of error, mistake, and accident in your work a bit more?

NASHAT: In Hustle in Hand, my editing program was interrupting the playback of my video. One frame from a completely different section of the video would intrude into the clips. I ended up keeping this glitch because it breaks the linear narrative of the timeline—it’s like a preview of the footage that is yet to come. In PresentSore, meanwhile, I brought the wrong resolution into the project, but then I decided to keep it as it complicates the view of the body. Capturing body limbs is such an ordinary image to do. You need these kinds of tricks to ramp up attention. Technological accidents are what make the work more vulnerable. If you keep them, you can of course normalize them, but I find it useful for them to remain as anomalies that serve the work.

SCHÖNEICH: Already in early works, like in Factor Green (2011), or in your exhibition at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, you investigated the meaning and the visual presence of the pedestal or plinth itself. At Portikus and the forthcoming Walker exhibition Question the Wall Itself, you present a series of sculptures—pedestal blocks—resting on chairs that you say are designed for them to “relax.”

NASHAT: Yes, the pedestal is to the artwork what the foot is to the body. It provides the support that allows the artwork to stand and be on display. It’s like a pair of crutches. PresentSore toys with the fact that high-definition imagery being now at the service of “supporting” the body. It makes the pedestal obsolete. Chômage technique is a French term used when, say, a factory lays off its workers but maintains their salary. In a world of bodies shown in pixels, pedestals are a kind of “chômage technique”—they have no one to support anymore. In my installation, they can retire and enjoy the viewing of the bodies they once would have supported. The pedestal has always been an underdog, or in the service of something else. But in this configuration it is as if it has won the lottery and is off to retire in Florida.

People are standing in the shade of a petrol station. Dark smoke is rising. A young man waves a slingshot in a circle over his head. It is 1:45 pm on May 15, 2014 in the West Bank. A male wearing a backpack enters the picture. A few seconds later, a bullet hits him from behind. He falls to the ground. Helpers rush to his aid. It is 2:58 pm on May 15, 2014. More gray smoke is billowing upwards. From the right, a man enters the picture. He is shot in the chest and falls to the ground. People rush to help him. This footage by a security camera shows the killings of Nadim Siam Nawara, age 17, and Mohammad Mahmud Odeh Abu Daher, age 16, which were committed during the demonstrations on Nakba Day near Ofer Israeli military prison by Ramallah.

“The images captured on video show unlawful killings where neither child presented a direct and immediate threat to life at the time of their shooting. These acts by Israeli soldiers may amount to war crimes, and the Israeli authorities must conduct serious, impartial, and thorough investigations to hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes,” Rifat Kassis, the spokesperson of the human rights organization Defence for Children International, declared soon thereafter to the public. In addition to the surveillance videos, there are also audio recordings taken by a television crew at the scene of the crime that will be used as evidence in an audio-ballistic analysis to clarify how and from what direction the two unarmed Palestinian teens were fatally shot. The key question here is whether the soldiers and border police officers fired live ammunition or rubber bullets, as the Israeli security forces stated in their own defense. An investigation now aims to solve the murders.

Two years later, artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan develops Rubber Coated Steel, an extensive video installation at Portikus that reconstructs the events and makes the sounds recorded at the crime scene visible as images. His mixed media work consists of visualized frequency bands of the tracks and found video materials which, arranged within the architecture of a shooting range, also document the course of events. However, before the video work Rubber Coated Steel was created, Hamdan’s findings and the reports drawn up together with the London Institute of Forensic Architecture were used as legal evidence against the Israeli soldiers to prove their violation of the arms agreement with the United States before Congress in Washington, D.C.

The interpretative force of the auditory material in this particular case can also be found in the significance Hannah Arendt ascribed to listening and seeing for the process of comprehension. In 1961, she wanted to personally witness the trial of SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann before the Jerusalem district court and thus proposed to The New Yorkerthat she serves as an observer of the court proceedings. She justified this decision in a letter to her former teacher Karl Jaspers, writing, “I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn’t go and look at this walking disaster face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness, without the mediation of the printed word. Don’t forget how early I left Germany and how little of all this I really experienced directly.”1
In Jerusalem, Arendt was prepared to encounter a vicious monster. During the trial, however, her expectations were not met, instead she experienced a person who followed and issued instructions from behind his desk and seemed barely conscious of the consequences of his actions. Therefore, in her final report Arendt developed the mental figure of the “banality of evil” 2
, for which she was criticized sharply from many sides, but which today largely influences our understanding of the brutality of the crimes committed against the Jews.

Similar to Arendt, for Hamdan, precise observation and analysis are the keys to comprehending the inconceivable. His examination of the audio material and precise evaluation of the results are an attempt to actually prove that live ammunition was fired to shoot the teenagers and to justly solve the crimes. As Arendt clearly defined the subjectivity of her report, Hamdan, too, reflects the conditions of his analysis by exhibiting the technological apparatus operating between the incident and the judgment. At Portikus, he shows the visualized frequency bands, presents the relevant video clips, and makes the shots audible over and over again. The situation that we experience in the exhibition is not only a meticulous reconstruction of the incident, but it also offers the chance to understand how the available body of evidence was analyzed, evaluated, and interpreted. Rubber Coated Steel seeks justice while reflecting, as legal reports can never do, on how fragmentary pieces of proofs are shaped to form a conclusion.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Statue of Liberty has stood before the coast of New York guarding over freedom and its observance in the nation. The colossal statue was shipped in pieces from Europe to America. Both the Statue of Liberty and the written Constitution of the eighteenth century, which Lady Liberty holds in her hand, embody and symbolize a Western concept of freedom that remains valid today. This also encompasses the constitutionally safeguarded freedom of individuals to express their own opinions in words and images. In Germany, freedom of expression is anchored in Article 5 of the Basic Law. Nowadays more than ever, this is an essential right that demands protection, but is constantly being stretched to its limits.

Peaceful debate and dialogue between people with opposing opinions is an important feature of a democratic society. In recent years, however, there are political tendencies that noticeably restrict freedom of expression. This is happening in European democracies, but political voices that speak up against tolerant societies are growing stronger all over the world. For example, there are clear restrictions to press freedom in Turkey. Government-critical Turkish journalists are being imprisoned and freedom of expression seems no longer possible.

Yet open and critical dialogue and tolerance towards contrary opinions are essential for our coexistence. This dialogue can be initiated and held by the media or with the means of art. Danh Vo, who fled with his family at the age of four from Vietnam to Denmark, shows parts of the Statue of Liberty in his work WE THE PEOPLE.

Danh Vo reconstructs individual elements of the statue, which was once shipped in individual parts, and never shows them as a whole, but in fragments. The artist produced 225 elements of copper in an exact replica of the Statue of Liberty. The monumental sculpture is thereby abstracted; the symbol for which she stands seems broken.

Danh Vo’s assessment of the Statue of Liberty and its significance takes place on different levels in his WE THE PEOPLE. On the one hand, the artist takes up one of the symbols of freedom directly; on the other hand, the title of the work refers to the first three words of the preamble of the American Constitution from the 18th century. With WE THE PEOPLE, Danh Vo reflects in a simple manner on the concept of freedom and, with the unassembled details, shows how fragile freedom is and that although we regard it as self-evident, it must be protected and preserved.

Freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly are among the fundamental pillars of a democratic society. In her book Notes toward a performative theory of assembly, the American philosopher Judith Butler writes that freedom of assembly is a decisive feature of a nation’s sovereignty.1
According to the Butler, the right to assemble freely as a group is a basic prerequisite for politics that must not be restricted by governments. 2

The people must have the right to assemble freely at any time. The phrase “We the people,” both the title of Danh Vo’s work as well as the introductory words of the U.S. Constitution, is repeatedly taken up by assembled groups. However, according to Judith Butler an assembled group claiming to be “We the people” cannot exist because it can only represent a certain section of a population. Likewise, the parts of Danh Vo’s WE THE PEOPLE, which are never put together to form a whole but are presented only as individual pieces in exhibitions, stand for a larger whole and at the same time for the many different people and groups in our society.

What might a minor history of Portikus told through video look like? Helke Bayrle’s Portikus Under Construction (1992-Present) gives this history its images, building an institutional memory and body of artworks out of what is almost always erased and obfuscated: work left outside of finalized and public-facing installations within the main gallery. Though the artworks in this screening program are by no means minor in and of themselves, they work outside of the limits of these artists’ previous contributions to the exhibitionary legacy of Portikus. Almost none of these films and videos have been shown within Portikus before, yet they provide a vehicle for reflection through their addition and deviation. In an effort to let these relations permeate the methods of this program, groupings of films and videos will together assert the value of lack, the uncertain, the secondary, the obscured, the forgotten, and the unclassifiable. Inspired by Bayrle, this project attempts to build a minor history of Portikus from these foggy positions.

26.07.2017
2. Dara Friedman
-Dara Friedman, Dancer (2011)Dancer was presented at Portikus in conjunction with the installation of segments of the video at the Frankfurt Airport on the occasion of Portikus XXX, curated by Fabian Schöneich and Franz Hempel.

A book of Mike Kelley’s writings bears the title Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals.1
These texts are secondary works in that they did not feature as the central objects of display within his exhibitions. They are more of a textual infrastructure for art objects and videos. If Kelley’s sculptures and videos are given primacy within the space of exhibitions where the presence of text is reduced or rendered totally absent, then these texts could be said to be secondary (or made secondary) even if they might be integral to Kelley’s art making. Forced into the periphery of one’s consideration, that which is secondary in these ways is also minor. The minor is what is comparatively lesser in significance when held against a major event; an exhibition of artworks in this case. But one might reconsider the significance of major works through the framework laid by minor materials. Kelley’s Minor Histories inflects the perception of his major works through texts that affect his works in retrospect by providing a previously inaccessible supplement. This move – from major to minor, from macro to micro – is also characteristic of “microhistory” as a method of historical research. In a preface to the Italian edition of The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (a founding work of what has come to be known as micro-history), the Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg writes this:

In the past historians could be accused of wanting to know only about “the great deeds of kings,” but today this is certainly no longer true. More and more they are turning toward what their predecessors passed over in silence, discarded, or simply ignored. “Who built Thebes of the seven gates?” Bertold [sic] Brecht’s “literate worker” was already asking. The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its significance.2

This is the ethos of micro-history and also that of Minor Histories and this screening program, built up through the centralization of the minor and the secondary and the modes of historical re-assessment that they enable.

In continuing to use the terms “minor” and “secondary,” I do not mean for these nominative classifications to reassert a hierarchy of value that makes such materials as subservient to a main event, whatever that might be. This screening program intends to think through the value of working with/in the secondary or minor, making them the central subjects and methods of inquiry, despite the denigration of materials categorized as such. These terms are always relative anyway.

In the context of this screening series, galleried exhibitions at Portikus and the specific artworks they contain become the “main event.” That which rests outside of this (e.g. the artists’ other artworks, art programming that occurs elsewhere in the institution’s architecture, and presentations that sit out of line with the normal temporal constraints of the exhibition) becomes minor or secondary.

Helke Bayrle’s ongoing video project, Portikus Under Construction (1992-Present) operates through the staging of strange paradoxes in this schema. Her videos capture the pre-exhibition installations at Portikus, where scaffolding is erected and dismantled, artworks are crated in, and plans are carried through or changed to accommodate some unforeseen hiccup. Though these events and processes are foundational to the staging of exhibitions in the gallery, they are secondary to a finalized presentation of artworks. On Bayrle’s project, Kirsty Bell writes:

Helke Bayrle trains her eyes on peripheral details, on discreet gestures, on banal activities, in order to get at exactly these parts of the creative process: the things “taken for granted but not said.3

Helke Bayrle, Portikus Under Construction (Frances Stark), 2008.

But are these things really taken for granted because they are unquestionably banal and peripheral? What has pushed them away and into banality? The necessity of an action does not make it banal. There is still deviation within the supposedly normal. In most instances, pre-exhibition labor (the “banal” work in question) is obscured, despite its necessity, in a finalized product fit for a proper opening. I do not mean to imply that all art exhibitions seek to actively suppress the labor and laborers that construct them, but to note a rather typical lack of visibility given over to this (art?) work. Bayrle’s work provides a stage for what goes unseen to be given a new visibility, re-weaving these “secondary” actions into the primary artwork. The supposedly “banal” is not shrugged off or hidden. Its banality is challenged. The minor becomes the major.

With only one exception (Bayrle), these films and videos have never been shown in an exhibition at Portikus before; yet they have been assembled for a screening program to mark the 30th anniversary of the institution. It is an occasion that one might expect to be used to concretize an institutional history. What sort of history is constructed through an assembly of parts that bears only tangential relation to past programming? Might it be a minor one? It would be a bit overblown to present these films and videos within such a thematic frame if their non-exhibition was the only thing that marked them as minor or secondary.

However, it isn’t simply their non-inclusion from past programming that allows them to speak to and from these positions. Through formal methods that play with a tension between the hidden and the revealed, didactic notices of omission, and evasions of false clarity through excess or lack, these videos and films approach material from the bottom and the side as they re-appraise events made minor.

The first section of the screening program is titled Filming Lack. It gathers around the video Corpse Cleaner (2016), by the moving image collective Thirteen Black Cats.4Corpse Cleaner gives visual traces to that which would otherwise go unseen: secret epistolary exchanges, the production of Hollywood films, and the atomic. All three are wound through each other with the atomic as their linchpin in a long take that snakes through a prop warehouse where the forgotten infrastructure of big-budget movie production resides. Thirteen Black Cats makes their video in the negative, using impressions and aftereffects to register the resistance of the atomic to clean and discrete images. Both form and content approach major events (i.e. the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States military) through the peripheral and the minor.

Thirteen Black Cats, Corpse Cleaner, 2016, Courtesy the artists.

The screening series concludes with Morgan Fisher’s film Standard Gauge (1984) as part of the event Non-work. Pulling his collection of 35mm film stock across a light box, Fisher comments on the content of each frame and the hidden histories of labor and production that result in the images we see burned into the film. His narration gives voice to that which is obscured in a finished Hollywood movie playing out on the silver screen, stripped of all its imperfections and messy origins. Lab technicians, projectionists, and anonymous women used to calibrate film color are all rewritten into a final product that typically relies on the erasure of any traces of their work.

Stretched between Standard Gauge and Corpse Cleaner, this summer screening series tries to keep faithful to its bookends and the drive towards a re-appraisal of the minor that Helke Bayrle plants at the core of an unfolding history of Portikus. On the occasion of the institution’s 30th anniversary, an event marked by city wide installations, events, and readings under the banner of Portikus XXX, the summer screening series will try to approach the marking of historical events from below and behind, from the secondary and the minor.

What other commodities lose is their form; but this form is what gives them them their exchange value, while their use value consists in overcoming this form, in consuming it. With money, on the other hand, its substance, its materiality, is itself its form, in which it represents wealth. If money appears as the general commodity in all places, so also does it in all times. It maintains itself as wealth at all times. Its specific durability. It is the treasure which neither rust nor moths eat up.1

But what if money was gobbled up and, later, shit out still intact? Its value would remain, despite its abject denigration in human intestinal tubing. Conversely, its social value might plummet upon touching and moving through shit, and would remain a trigger for revulsion long after it became clean again.

This passage from mouth to anus, or from hand to hand or purse to register in more conventional usage, does allow subtle abrasions and erosions to accrue over time despite the impression of durability given by a coin’s metallic substance. Contra Marx, a copper penny is metallic money that oxidizes and rusts. Its movement also necessitates wear and the slow build up of dirt, slime, or other excremental substances that coat both city streets and the grasping fingers that disaffectedly drop them in tip jars or flick them into wishing wells. Though a penny’s surface may shine under light, metallic glow is not equivalent to the cleanly or the sanitary despite the frigid institutional affect produced by silver doors and turnstiles. The warm reflected light of copper can obscure a pock-marked surface with gashes and crags where dirt can hide in the marks of faltering durability. Without a macro-zoom or bacterial culture test, this filth goes largely unnoticed beneath a reflective copper sheen despite commonplace warnings of money’s filth. Generally, these moralistic warnings backhandedly revile sex workers and panhandlers. They are sites where small money passes between those designated as socially and physically unclean.

A high school friend once stuck a penny into their anus, removed it, and threw it into a group of friends on a couch who scattered immediately in disgust. Besides the comic hyperbole this gesture made of the link between coin money and the anal, it also demonstrated why money maintains its value in the process of its fecal abjection and slow decomposition in exchange. “We value money because we value our shit.”2
Like feces, coin money is detachable from the human body, able to float untethered through channels of exchange and value transformation that exceed single persons. Its malleability and shifting nature are what is necessary to money for it to function as currency accepted in the purchase of commodities of different types. A few coins equals a trip to a train station toilet as well as a bar of chocolate or butter.

Like every child who put pennies on their tongue, which is to say every child, I remember the taste of pennies; they tasted exactly like blood. This act was inspired by a kind of boredom, but also a tentative understanding of knowledge: to know something would be to take it all in. To take the coin like communion was a means of making something public private, a secret thing. Ultimately, I knew this was filthy, and felt ambivalently drawn to this newfound play, both impressed and disgusted with myself. Rolling coins around my mouth was a way to learn what I would spend years forgetting: money is the dirtiest thing. That doesn’t stop people from wanting it.

Whenever she learned, Moyra Davey hasn’t forgotten. Since the early 90s, the artist has steadily been making work related to the psychology of money and its Freudian transformative properties: shit-to-gold, a fairy-tale fantasy. Her 1990 video Hell Notes performs the correlation between money and desire. Recently digitized and presented for the first time since its 1991 screening at the Collective for Living Cinema, the video fragments the spatial relations between the construction of New York, the manual work of the unconscious, alongside discussions of money and shit, excess and expenditure.

Desire being a form of hunger, eating and excrement are never far from money. In her 2014 text on appetites and cravings, thinness and productivity, Walking with Nandita, Davey writes “I am trying to think “language or hunger,” but I inevitably supplant hunger with eating, not eating, and shitting, all of which differ from hunger.”3Will rather than necessity grounds the vortex-like relationship between eating, hunger and transformation. Hell Notes concludes with the artist unwrapping pennies wrapped in lard and cooking them on a cast iron grill, fat gurgling around the coins. Circuitously, accidentally, serendipitously looping back on itself, as Davey’s work often does, her 2006 video Fifty Minutes begins with the artist considering her relation to the shifting contents of her fridge. “I get an unmistakable pleasure out of seeing the contents of the fridge diminish, out of seeing the spaces between the food items get larger and better defined […] That is my aim with the fridge: to be able to open it and see as much of its clean, white, empty walls as possible.”4

I’m convinced that somewhere in this work of emptying out there’s a link to decreation, the name the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil gave to her project of undoing the self. “Decreation,” a neologism, is defined with most clarity in Gravity and Grace: "Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated. Destruction: to make something created pass into nothingness. A blameworthy substitute for decreation."5
This extended not only a philosophy, but to a daily bodily regime. Weil limited her food consumption to what she believed German-occupied French residents were then eating, and died of starvation. Language or hunger. “The body is a lever for salvation,” Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. But in what way? What is the right way to use it?